2/24/2010 @ 8:30PM

Deadly Recalls

The pitchfork-bearing populists calling for Akio Toyoda’s head would do well to remember that in the annals of recall history,
Toyota
‘s latest is just a blip on a radar screen filled with contaminated school lunch meat and toxic baby formula.

Toyota’s
floor mats and sticky pedal problems, combined, have led to the recall of 6.5 million vehicles in the U.S. That number could skyrocket if safety advocates can prove the automaker’s sudden acceleration issues are instead tied to more sinister electrical troubles. But for now, Toyota’s recall is still well short of the largest vehicle recall of all time. That dubious honor belongs to Ford’s 14.9 million vehicles (and counting) recall for a faulty cruise control switch that causes spontaneous engine fires.

Still there seems to be something about the idea of your Camry careening to a terrifying death that has captured the public imagination like few other deadly recalls. But life-threatening products are becoming more commonplace. Think back to last December, when nearly every Roman-style window blind and roller shade in the U.S., some 50 million, was recalled following reports that the cords had killed 5 small children and nearly strangled 16 others. A month earlier the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission forced parents to reassemble some 2 million new cribs, when drop-side cribs were pulled after suffocating four infants to death.

And how can we forget peanut-butter-gate? One year ago, a Georgia processing plant knowingly shipped over 30 million pounds of salmonella-laced peanut butter and peanut paste for use in a staggering 1,800 peanut products, causing 8 known deaths and 500 illnesses across the country.

A year before that the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the largest beef recall in U.S. history, targeting 143 million pounds of beef from a slaughterhouse caught using sick cows. By the time the recall was announced in February 2008, most of that beef had already been eaten–including a distressing 37 million pounds worth of hamburgers, tacos and chili consumed in schools. To date, 2 deaths and 26 other illnesses have been linked to the tainted meat. What’s more disturbing, later that year the Food and Drug Administration discovered trace amounts of the toxic chemical melamine in baby formula, which caused 4 infant deaths and 50,000 more hospitalizations. In China melamine contamination proved more widespread–nearly all the country’s liquid dairy had to be pulled.

Humans aren’t the only ones at risk. It seems even our puppies aren’t safe. In March 2007 1,200 pet food products were recalled when melamine-contaminated pet food, imported from China, killed some 1,950 cats and 2,200 dogs. This month a Chinese national, her husband and their pet-food company, Las-Vegas-based ChemNutra, pled guilty to charges they imported and misbranded what was purported to be wheat gluten, but instead was poison.

It’s still unclear whether Toyota knowingly hid its runaway crisis, but an internal Toyota memo leaked to the press this week is only fueling conspiracy theorists. In the memo the Japanese automaker estimated it had saved $100 million by negotiating a limited recall for its sudden acceleration issues back in 2007, calling it a “win” for the company.

The automaker would have done well to take a lesson from Tylenol. Back in 1982 Tylenol-manufacturer McNeil Healthcare LLC was universally praised for quickly pulling 31 million bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol off shelves when capsules tainted with cyanide were found to have killed 7 people.

Then again, that lesson was lost on McNeil itself. Last month, the FDA slammed McNeil for being slow to respond to 20 months worth of complaints that more than two dozen of its over-the-counter products contained a foul odor. McNeil is now facing twice the fallout of its 1982 quagmire: Some 60 million bottles of various Tylenol products have been pulled from shelves.